Читать книгу Daniel Isn’t Talking - Marti Leimbach, Marti Leimbach - Страница 8

4

Stephen dated me at the same time his girlfriend, Penelope, was having an affair with her university professor. I would have learned a great deal about Penelope if Stephen had taken me to his flat, a large floor-through at the top of a Victorian conversion in Belsize Park, as all of her clothes were strewn across the floor’s oak-wood planks, along with various bizarre musical instruments – most of which looked like elaborate sticks or pots. Balingbings and bamboo xylophones, African gourd drums and Romanian pan pipes shared space with a grand piano from 1926, which aged gracefully on one side of the room. Penelope is an ethnomusicologist, which means she studies music such as Manchurian shamanic drumming, Brazilian death metal, Scots pipe music and even some Continental street busking. I wish I could report that she is a dry-thinking, doughy girl who dresses in woollen trousers and enjoys open fires, but Penelope is the sort of person who, though quite capable of pulling off a day at Ascot in a big hat, prefers miniskirts and boots up to her thighs, cuts the necks out of her sweatshirts and wears them hanging about her shoulders, sleeps in the nude amid satin sheets and takes pride in the fact that she can accomplish most sexual acts even underwater. Well, this is what I’ve managed to wheedle out of Stephen anyway – and yes, I wish I’d never asked. Penelope’s parents, as it happened, were believers in the theory that humans evolved from fish, and spent every family holiday risking their children’s lives in scuba gear and wetsuits. Thus, the child had learned at least how to hold her breath.

She is not a beauty, Penelope. She has a hook nose and stringy hair, eyes that seem overly wide apart in her face, like those of a cow. But she has something about her that far outclasses the likes of Stephen, who it must be said is a man who understands his limitations and so, perhaps unwisely, surrounds himself with extraordinary people to lighten his spirits and to give him something to think about other than whatever happens to be on television that week. Even I can see Penelope’s appeal, her showy sexuality, her beautifully articulated vowels. When she met me once by accident on the street, she did not say, ‘Oh, you,’ with haughty disregard, but instead asked me to say a number of words for her: zebra, aluminum, advertisement, Alabama. The sound of these words seemed to fill her with a moment of exhilaration, such that the nostrils of her bony nose quivered, hearing the long ‘a’ of Alabama, the protracted ‘oο’ of aluminum. Like Henry Higgins, she could place an accent without trouble, and she declared correctly that I was mid-Atlantic, but with some time further south, possibly Virginia. To Stephen she said, ‘Hi, pet,’ and then moved on.

But Stephen did not mention Penelope, or give hint to the fact she’d bought that flat with him, nor that his relationship with her was crumbling with the arrival at the University of London of a member of the elite among French ethnomusicologists, Dr Jacques-Pierre Devereaux, world-renowned expert on Asian idiophonic sound, who had whisked Penelope away to do field work in Thailand. He took me chastely to Hampstead Heath, where we sat on the lawn by the lake, watching a fireworks display.

‘What would be your eight desert island discs?’ he asked me. I had no idea what he meant, having not at that time ever heard the Radio 4 show in which celebrities are asked what they’d listen to if stuck on a desert island. I didn’t understand that this question was loaded with the invitation to display a sharpness of mind and deep cultural understanding of classical music.

‘Peter and the Wolf?’ I said. I could not think of a second. Stephen was stretched out on a tartan rug, his chin resting in his hands. Fireworks filled the night air with booming sounds, with bright colours reflecting now against his skin. His face took on an almost tribal aspect. When I declared I had no second choice, he pushed his gaze in the direction of the lake, wearing an expression as if he was suddenly, irretrievably bored. I am not a stupid woman. This gesture alone should have been indication enough to me that Stephen expected a woman to entertain him in that Edwardian manner of being pleasantly witty in conversation, knowledgeable about history, proficient at the piano or perhaps even the harp. In other words, that he would be no great friend of mine whatever he thought of my legs. But I shrugged, blew the grey wisps of a spent dandelion in his direction, and announced that I preferred the music of seashells and mermaids, of bellowing whales and chattering dolphins. Wouldn’t the desert island be a symphony enough for me, providing as it did all of these sounds, not to mention the ceaseless clap of waves against rocks, the delicately lapping surf?

He seemed pleased with that answer. Clasping my naked ankle, he pulled me gently beside him on the rug, kissed me and called me darling.

I can only imagine what Penelope would have answered to such a question.

‘So, is this what is bothering you?’ asks Jacob now. His eyes are large and round in the dim light of his study. His leather chair creaks as he shifts his weight, leaning toward me. ‘This woman? Penelope?’

I shake my head. I don’t even know why I’ve wasted his time with this information. Wasted my time.

‘Then can we talk about what is really going on?’ Jacob asks.

‘I don’t know what is really going on,’ I say.

When I want him, I must go to him, find him, take him by the hand. In the sunlight, he lies on his back, his legs kicking the glass doors in a steady rhythm, his small fingers shoved down his nappy. He will not speak or look at me while I sound out words for him. It appears a deliberate effort, this turning away, for he seems to search for everything but my face, my eyes that seek him out, my lips that produce the words I am so desperate for him to try. ‘Mummy,’ I say, hoping he will imitate. Beside me is Emily, her mouth pursed reproachfully at her brother, who is pulling away from me now, having decided that if he cannot be left alone to kick the door he would rather be in another room. ‘Say Mummy, Daniel!’ Emily urges. But he will not speak to us or stay with us. He wiggles free and begins to climb. A spot of sunlight has divided into a rainbow across one side of the wall, and he is scrambling up the back of the sofa now to lay his tongue against its colours.

‘I’ve made an appointment for Daniel to see a consultant about his hearing,’ I tell Stephen. ‘So you’re going to have to move the school thing.’

He is sitting at the table eating his lunch as he studies the Financial Times. He flaps the paper to uncrease it, glances at me, then returns to the headlines. He says, ‘This is a top girls’ school and it has exactly two places available for the autumn.’

I decide that if he isn’t going to look at me, then I am not going to answer, at least not out loud. Instead, I shrug. I send my eyebrows up and tilt my head this way and that, as though considering what Stephen is saying. None of this can he see because he is too busy reading the Financial Times. But then he lays the paper on the table, folds his arms across his chest, and sighs. ‘Melanie, I am listening,’ he says reasonably. ‘I think we should both be there. Why aren’t you eating anything?’

In front of me is a cheese omelette, peas and grilled tomato, all of it grown cold. ‘I am eating,’ I say. ‘I’m about to eat.’

He says, ‘Emily should be there. They’ll want to meet her.’

At the other end of the table is Emily in a plastic smock with a big flower printed across the front. She is painting a blue cap on to a plastic monkey the size of her hand and seems wholly disinterested in our conversation. ‘She’s four years old,’ I say. ‘What are they going to do, give her a test?’

I’d meant to be sarcastic, but Stephen looks at me squarely and says, ‘Yes.’ Then he takes my fork and stabs at the omelette. Adding on a few peas, he holds the fork to my mouth. Then he smiles, a gorgeous warm smile, and it seems to me that I haven’t seen him smile at me in so long I stare at him, mesmerised. He looks so sweet all of a sudden that I wish we could just stay like this. He says, ‘You are going to eat. Emily is going to go to school. Things are going to be normal around here.’

I open my mouth for the omelette, chew slowly, still watching Stephen, who I realise now is just trying to manage our family the same way he manages his office. If I let him, perhaps he will succeed.

‘What about Daniel?’

‘What about him?’ he says.

‘The appointment with the consultant.’

‘How many consultants do you need?’ Stephen cuts some more of my omelette, hands me the fork, then nods to indicate that I should eat. ‘Didn’t you already take Daniel to a consultant? I certainly have a bill for a consultant.’

‘He wasn’t so good, that doctor. This next one is the very best.’ I chew slowly, then put my fork down, standing now to clear the plates. ‘I don’t want Emily tested,’ I say.

He is annoyed, but all he says is, ‘Move the appointment.’

‘I’m really worried about Daniel.’

‘About his hearing?’ asks Stephen. ‘You think there’s something wrong with his hearing?’

I consider this. ‘No, unfortunately, I doubt it’s his hearing,’ I say.

Stephen looks at me as though I’ve just said something very sinister, disloyal; immediately I am shamed. Then he says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with Daniel, full stop. He’s a boy. Boys are slower than girls. As for Emily, she won’t even know she’s being tested.’ He points his chin toward Emily. ‘Emily, do you care about being tested?’ he asks her.

Emily glances up from her monkey. She has a splash of paint across her cheek and some in her hair, too. ‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Oh, come on,’ Stephen says. ‘You don’t even know what “tested” means.’

‘Mummy thinks it’s bad,’ she says.

Stephen rolls his eyes at me. ‘Oh great.’

I say, ‘It’s as though she’s applying for a job.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Everybody tests kids these days,’ Stephen says. ‘It’s all part of the programme.’

Daniel has given up on the rainbow and wanders now into the kitchen where we are talking. I go to hug him but he refuses my body, rolling his shoulders to evade my grasp. Tiptoeing across the kitchen floor, he arrives at the refrigerator, expertly tackling the child lock, to remove two pints of milk. Emily adds a blue jacket to the monkey, who I suppose she wants to look like the circus ringmaster for Dumbo. He’d be more authentic if he didn’t have his fangs bared.

‘Then what’s going to happen when they test him?’ I say, meaning Daniel, who is now pouring the milk straight on to the floor, without even looking up to see if anybody is noticing.

When finally Stephen and I slept together, it was not in his flat but in Cath’s, which she’d left empty while on holiday in France. I didn’t quite understand why we were there (he’d said that he had to stop by to water the plants) or whose flat it was, and I must report that I felt a bit like a hooker. Things I couldn’t help noticing: how we made love on the floor, not the bed; how he washed out the coffee mugs we used and put them away so it seemed nobody had ever been there. When he told me he loved me I didn’t believe him. I judged him to be the sort of half-nice fellow who thinks he has to love a girl to sleep with her, and I didn’t answer back. You might think that would be the end of things, as I was meant to return to America anyway – I was only in Britain for a year, completing a kind of ersatz degree at Oxford on an exchange basis. Not a proper degree, you understand, just something they fling at Americans so they can get their own students over to the States for free. I’d said on the application that I had a sincere interest in British literature, which wasn’t entirely untrue. But having completed my undergraduate degree and having no idea what else to do with myself now that I was supposed to be out in the world doing something, I thought Oxford sounded nice. Pleasant. Cultured. I had the image of streets laced with coffee houses and obscure specialty shops, crowded with bicycles and peoples of every nation, of dazzling young men in greatcoats and wire-rimmed spectacles, of tweedy professors searching second-hand bookshops in their slippered feet. And it was exactly like that. A great place to hide from the world, so long as you didn’t trip over the drunks or fall headlong through the windows of one or other topless dance bar.

‘Stay with me,’ Stephen urged. ‘I adore you.’

I didn’t know how torn up he was over Penelope’s sudden exit from his life; I was still floating in the aftermath of my mother’s death, then my motorcyclist’s death. In the wake of such events, his seemed an appealing proposition. The truth was I didn’t want to go back home. It felt easier to live freshly in England. So for many months I lived in London among Penelope’s musical instruments, her bizarre tapes of chanting monks and crashing metal and homemade pan-pipes from distant lands. One only had to flip a switch to hear drums that seemed to whip up the blood inside you, mouth harps that extolled the loneliness of mountains. I never intended to fall in love with Stephen, just to bide some time and think of what I should do next. It was a strange, uncontrolled period in my life. For the first time ever I had no place I was meant to be, nobody to whom I owed an account for my time or an explanation for my whereabouts. For hours each day I lay on the couch listening to tiny violins played by equally tiny men who hailed from Chiapas, Mexico. I read all of Martin Luther King’s writings, and discovered that I would be quite capable of believing in God if anyone ever cared to mention Him any more. Toward the end of the summer, just about the time I thought I’d better return to America – for surely there is a reason to live in one’s own country? – I discovered as though by accident that I’d fallen in love with Stephen.

We were in his muddy blue Volkswagen driving out to South Wales. There was a particular beach we liked that made only a pathetic nod toward tourism and was more or less vacant most of the year. I looked at his profile as he sang along with a Van Morrison song, his hand on my knee, and I realised I loved him dearly, the way you do a great friend or a member of your family. He had a knack for making me feel good, bringing me tea in bed and reading me jokes from a book just like my brother used to do when we were kids. He was an expert camper and knew, for example, how to pitch a tent in the wind and cook an entire breakfast using only a tiny gas cylinder. One day we saw a rosewood vanity box in the market on Portobello Road. He brought it home and made it into a record player, that old-fashioned relic of a machine, with speakers so small we could tuck them on the window sill behind the bed. Even now, when we make love, he moves over me silently and thoroughly and selflessly, kissing me afterward, his hands in my hair.

‘And that is how often each week?’ asks my shrink, his notepad on his thigh, his mechanical pencil hovering above.

‘That isn’t the problem either,’ I tell him.

He sighs, shakes his head. Slaps his pen on the clipboard.

But this session, session number two zillion, we hit on it.

‘What am I scared of?’ I say, whimpering. One hour, sixty-five pounds, thirty minutes of London traffic each way, a splitting headache, no workable drugs, and all I’ve done is cry. ‘What am I scared of?’

He nods. Says nothing. Fixes his lips into a serious expression. Another time, not now, I might wonder what Jacob thinks about during the session when all that happens is a lot of crying. But I’m not thinking about Jacob.

‘There’s something wrong with my baby,’ I say, sputtering through the sentence, all snot and tears, my ears ringing, a stabbing pain in my throat.

‘What is wrong with him?’ asks Jacob slowly.

I feel my child is slipping away from me. It is as though he’s lost, or hovering distantly along the horizon, even when he is right up close, even when he is in my arms. I don’t know why I feel this way, or what to do to hold on to him. Somewhere in the world, right now, a new baby has been born and everyone is celebrating that he is just so perfect. All around me spring is bursting forth. There’s flowers and birdsong and mothers with babies. All of this depresses me, and I cannot stand to admit it.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ I say. Daniel uses my hands like tools, opening my fingers and putting them on to his train so I will roll it. He spins on the wooden floor until he falls down, laughing, paces the edges of the garden so that there is a balding path, will eat nothing at all except biscuits and milk, has one stupid toy.

‘He’s got one toy!’ I say. ‘It’s like he’s hypnotised by it.’

‘What’s the toy?’ asks Jacob. This is typical and what I love about Jacob. He doesn’t say, ‘Then buy him another toy.’ He knows I’d have already bought him half the shop.

‘A train.’

Jacob considers this. ‘I used to have trains. My son had trains. I can remember the track took up the whole dining-room table and we built a station out of shoeboxes.’

‘Exactly!’ I say. ‘But Daniel doesn’t build the track or care about the station. It’s just this one stupid train!’

‘Have you taken him to a neurologist?’

That word – neurologist. I hate that word and all it signifies. It seems to me that once you are talking about neurology you are talking about sealed fate.

‘He’s going in two weeks to a paediatrician,’ I say. ‘The ENT consultant who gave him the hearing test said he was normal.’

‘What exactly did the consultant say?’ asks Jacob carefully.

So I tell him. ‘They put him in a soundproof room and had him build a tower out of coloured bricks. They wiggled things that made noise and flashed lights. They took some kind of photograph of the inside of Daniel’s ear. Then they said he was normal, take him home.’

Jacob nods, rubs his finger over the hair on his lip, pokes his pale tongue into the corner of his mouth and says, ‘So then what?’

‘I took him home.’ I took Daniel home and he stood on the table, trying to reach the light bulb, screaming because he could not. Then he laid the videos out across the living-room carpet with all their edges in perfect alignment. Then I tried to get him to look at me by stealing his train and holding it at the end of my nose. I took him to the park and let him sift sand through his fingers, which is all he would do. No playing tag, no feeding ducks. He used to love to feed the ducks. I went home and thought about how he used to chase them, laughing, how he used to throw balled-up pieces of old bread into the water and watch the ducks skim the surface with their bills. I got out photographs of him at that same duck pond, his face alight, his hands raised to throw more bread. I cried all night so that Stephen had to sleep on the living-room couch. In the morning I threatened to kill myself, which is how I ended up in Jacob’s office now, and why I am afraid to leave.